Mostly a links blog with occasional commentary on the linked articles (since 2010 mostly my book reviews) and infrequent personal updates.
I am a 62 year old married writer. See my website for my current writing projects and to download my ebooks; my Google about me page has links to my various web 2.0 venues.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

The following article is excerpted from the latest issue of n+1 magazine. This article is available online only in Slate.

‎"No one with 'literary' aspirations will expect to earn a living by publishing books; the glory days when publishers still waffled between patronage and commerce will be much lamented. The lit-lovers who used to become editors and agents will direct MFA programs instead; the book industry will become as rational—that is, as single-mindedly devoted to profit—as every other capitalist industry."

Will? Is it not to a considerable extent already so?

The author marks the boundaries of literary Brooklyn as DUMBO and Prospect Heights, but it is more accurate to draw its boundaries as a triangle that goes from Greenpoint in the northwest to Victorian Flatbush in the east to Red Hook in the southwest.

As a native New Yorker, Brooklynite, alumnus of a CCNY graduate creative writing program, poet/translator and fiction reviewer I am on the periphery of both literary cultures, and much of the article resonates with the ring of truth. However, in an era of government budget cuts I don't see MFA programs continuing to proliferate; indeed, they may prove vulnerable to the budget ax.

Friday, November 26, 2010

This year KinkyJews is holding their annual Hanukkah party at a comedy club. Some things will be the different (comedy show) and some will be the same as in previous years (a game of strip dreidle, traditional candle lighting, and eight raffle prizes).

Erotomania is an engaging portrait of a sex addicted couple, their therapy with an ex-military couples counselor, and their recovery. James has Turrets Syndrom and priapism; Monica is a nymphomaniac. Can they find love and build a life together? Will they have anything in common should they recover from their sex addiction? This short novel combines high and low brow culture in a way that I find appealing but some other readers might find pretentious and crude. That a sixty-something year old man can have sex three or four times a day every day requires a suspension of disbelief; apart from that, I enthusiastically recommend it.

In "A Hanukkah Project: Daniel Libeskind's Line of Fire" 40 hanukkiot (Hanukkah menorahs) selected by curator Susan Braunstein from The Jewish Museum's permanent collection of over 500 hanukkiot are displayed on a stand designed by architect Daniel Libeskind.

In 1938, Nicholas Winton helped 669 Jewish kids escape certain death from the Nazis. He never told anyone that he did this.

While on ski trip in Switzerland, Winton took a detour in Czechoslovakia to help the children of refugees. Nazi Germany had recently annexed a large part of Czechoslovakia and the news of Kristallnacht, a violent attack on Jews in Germany and Austria, had just reached Prague.

Winton set up a rescue operation for the children, filling out the required paperwork for them to be sent to homes in Sweden and Great Britain. He had to raise money to fund foster homes for all of them, and then he sent 669 children away from Czechoslovakia on trains before the Nazis closed down the borders.

Winton told no one that he did this, not even his wife. In 1988, his wife found a scrapbook full of pictures of the children and letters from parents in their attic. She arranged to have Winton's story appear in newspapers.

Many of the children Winton saved went on the BBC television program, That's Life, to meet him for the first time since the war. They refer to themselves as "Winton's children".

Winton is now 101 years old and has received awards from Israel and the Czech Republic as well as Knighthood from the Queen of England in 1993.

Maryland physician Andy Harris (R) just soundly defeated Frank Kratovil, one of the most endangered Democrats on Capitol Hill going into the November election. And he did it in large part by railing against 'Obamacare' and pledging to repeal Health Care Reform. But when he showed on Capitol Hill today for an orientation for incoming members of Congress and their staffs, he had a different question: Where's my government health care?

According to Glenn Thrush of Politico, Harris created a stir at the orientation meeting by demanding to know why he had to wait a month after he was sworn in in January for his government-subsidized health care to kick in. After responding in a huff, he even asked if there was some way he could buy into the government care in advance, seemingly thinking there might be a government program similar to the so-called 'public option' championed by progressive Democrats in 2009.

According to an unnamed congressional staffer quoted by Thrush, Harris stood up at the meeting "and asked the two ladies who were answering questions why it had to take so long, what he would do without 28 days of health care."

During the campaign, Harris told voters, "the answer to the ever-rising cost of insurance is not the expansion of government-run or government-mandated insurance but, instead, common-sense market based solutions that ensure decisions are made by patients and their doctors."

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

City Tech will mark the 72nd anniversary of Kristallnacht and the 65th anniversary of the end of WWII on Thursday, November 11, 1 p.m., with Ann Kirschner, PhD, author of Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story, and the presentation of humanitarian awards to Nobel Prize winner Günter Blobel, MD, PhD, and Interfaith Committee of Remembrance (ICOR) founder and chairman Jerry Jacobs.

Friday, November 5, 2010

This weekend enthusiasts and creators are gathering at the Brooklyn Lyceum, 227 Fourth Avenue between Union and President Streets in Park Slope, for King Con, the borough's first large comics convention, featuring fifty-plus exhibitors and top talent appearing in readings and panel discussions.

The subtitle of the book under review (in which the missing adjective “Heterosexual” should modify the noun “Women”) implies a question: How does erotic romance for women differ from the equivalent genre for men?

About Me

My translation of Israeli poet Rachel Eshed's book Little Promises is
published in a bilingual edition by Mayapple Press. In its Hebrew
original, this collection of intense erotic poetry won the 1992 AKUM
prize in Israel. My translation of one of the poems in Little Promises
was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Novelist Tsipi Keller says , "It is
hard to speak of Rachel Eshed's poetry without mentioning 'fire': her
poems virtually burn on the page, and David Cooper's renditions not
only do justice to the the original but magnify its richness."

Download pdf files of my two poetry collections, Glued To The Sky and
JFK: Lines of Fire (PulpBits, 2003) on my website.

Between 2007 and 2009 I compiled an archive of oral histories of
Jewish-American marriages. These oral histories have been taken by my
co-author Beth Rosenberg and me,
and I hope someday a selection of
them will be published in a form yet to be determined as I Am My Beloved's,a collection of interviews and photographs of
Jewish-American couples that will explore the intersection of each couple's
identities as a couple and as Jews and will reflect the diversity of the
Jewish-American community.